Meditation and Stress

One of the greatest benefits of meditation is how it reduces stress. To much stress can suppress the immune system, reduce memory and lead to weight gain and depression. In this video, Larry explains how your brain handles stress, and how learning to meditate can help calm your midbrain, reduce stress and generate creative solutions to the problems in your life.

Meditation and Stress
by: Larry Terkel // length: 6.47

TRANSCRIPT: Hello, today I’d like to talk to you about one of the greatest benefits that meditation can bring to your life and to your brain. Stress can be good. Stress has been necessary in our evolutionary development. It stimulates the fight or flight response, produces chemicals such as cortisol and adrenalin that removes us from immediate danger or helps us to counter that danger. But to much stress, chronic stress floods the body with these hormones, and these hormones have insidious side effects. To much cortisol suppresses the immune system. Reduces our memory capabilities. Increases depression, anxiety, makes it difficult for us to sleep. Is involved in weight gain.

Stress, chronic stress is not productive. But how do we reduce it in a society in which we are bombarded by commercials telling us how much we need in order to be happy. Evening news with all of the disasters around the world generating for that midbrain, fertile ground for worry and stress. Our bosses standing over our heads, our fear of losing our job. The economic news. All takes its toll. How can we possibly overcome it.

We try to sleep – here’s the issue with sleep – sleep, when you go to sleep, the level of oxygen consumption is a measure of how relaxed you are, and over five hours – it takes about five hours for you to reduce your oxygen consumption approximately eight percent bringing you to about 92% of wakefulness. Helpful. But now think about this – in a study out of Harvard, in meditation, oxygen consumption decreases by on average twice that, from 12–20%. And heres the most amazing part, that reduction takes place in the first three minutes. Three minutes of meditation brings you to that level of relaxation that takes, twice the level relaxation that takes five hours of sleep to get to. And when stress is reduced, when that midbrain is calm, then instead of cortisol flooding the body chemicals like serotonin and dopamine are produced which provide feelings of well-being and happiness. Depression is overcome. Anxiety is overcome. Blood pressure is reduced. Our ability to sleep is enhanced. Memory returns to normal. These are the benefits of meditation.

And understand that your brain – while only three pounds, two percent of your body weight – consumes about twenty percent of the blood and the oxygen and the glucose. Your brain is an energy glutton. And in meditation everything is brought to such a powerful level of calm, and remember, you don’t have to calm your mind in order to meditate. Your meditation will do that for you.

So think about those benefits. The practical benefits that can affect your life and your well being. I encourage you. Meditation is one of the most important skills that I have developed in my life. It has been an incredible gift. I gift that to you.

The technique that I have developed from over forty years of meditating, meditationPlus is geared to bringing that cortex and midbrain into harmony, calming the emotions, calming the worry and the stress and providing the opportunity for the “plus” part of meditationPlus to generate creative solutions to some of the biggest stressors in your life.

This is the power of meditation. This is the source of its many benefits. I encourage you to invest a little time to create some of the biggest benefits for your life. Have a great day.